Janine Jackson: What is clear is that the Trump White House wants what it wants, decades of carefully forged law and tradition be damned. One of the things it wants is the eradication of public expressions of dissent. Donald Trump has said that protest (against him and his friends) should be illegal, that those who engage in it should lose their jobs and/or have violence visited upon them.

If the White House can’t achieve that, well, they’ll get as close to as it they can, which brings us to the latest: The National Parks Service, under Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, seeking to rewrite the rules on free speech and demonstrations on those public lands that are under federal jurisdiction in Washington, DC. That would be the parks, sidewalks and streets in the country’s capital, that have seen some of the most significant public protests in US history.